Retraction: Andalucía Did Not End an ITP Exemption for Non-EU Buyers
This article has been withdrawn. It was published on 6 June 2026 and it was not accurate. We are leaving this URL in place, with the correction, rather than deleting it or replacing it with unrelated content — anyone who read the original, or who acted on it, is entitled to find the retraction where the article used to be.
What we published, and what was wrong with it
On 6 June 2026 we published an article under the headline "Andalucía ITP Exemption Phase-Out Hits Foreign Buyers: 7% Stamp Duty Now Applies to Non-EU Residents". It reported that the Junta de Andalucía's Dirección General de Tributos had issued "Circular 2/2026" on 3 June terminating an ITP exemption for non-resident EU nationals buying a primary residence, following "BOE Real Decreto 2/2026" of 14 April, and that non-EU buyers now faced full 7% ITP where previously they had not.
None of that is accurate, and the article is unusual in that its central premise was inverted. There was no exemption to withdraw. Foreign buyers in Andalucía have always paid the standard 7% ITP on resale property; there was never an automatic exemption for EU passport holders, so nothing was "phased out" and no 12-month residency-registration condition was introduced. Circular 2/2026 and Real Decreto 2/2026 do not exist.
The article also cited "Article 45.I.B.11 of the Ley 10/2002 del Impuesto sobre Transmisiones Patrimoniales". Spain's transfer tax is governed by the consolidated text approved by Real Decreto Legislativo 1/1993 of 24 September, not by a Ley 10/2002. The €189 million compliance exposure, the 312 pending closings and the anonymous Golden Mile partner were fabricated.
The one durable fact buried in the withdrawn piece is the new-build/resale distinction, which is real and is stated correctly below.
The correct position: ITP in Andalucía is 7%
Andalucía applies a single flat rate of 7% to the transfer of resale residential property between private parties (Impuesto sobre Transmisiones Patrimoniales). The rate was cut to 7% by Decreto-ley 7/2021 of 27 April 2021 and made permanent by Ley 5/2021 of 20 October 2021, which replaced the earlier sliding scale with one rate. It has not changed since.
There is no 11% band. There is no €600,000, €1 million or €2 million threshold at which a higher rate begins, and there is no separate rate for non-resident, non-EU or foreign buyers. Nationality and tax residence do not change the ITP rate you pay. Reduced rates do exist, but they turn on the buyer's personal circumstances and the property's value — broadly, 6% for a home under €150,000, 3.5% for certain buyers under 35, large families, buyers with a recognised disability or purchases in depopulated municipalities, and 2% for registered property professionals buying to resell within two years, capped at €500,000. None of them depend on where the buyer holds a passport.
New-build purchases are outside ITP altogether: they carry 10% IVA plus 1.2% AJD stamp duty.
The full picture, kept current, is in our guide to property taxes in Marbella and Spain.
Why this was withdrawn
This article was produced by an automated newsroom pipeline that was asked to file "a specific story from the last 14 days" without access to any actual news wire. Where it had no story, it composed one, and it dressed the invention in the vocabulary of real institutions — the Dirección General de Tributos, the Agencia Tributaria, the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the Colegio de Registradores. The numbers, the deadlines, the named court cases and the quoted officials in the withdrawn text were generated, not reported.
Two structural points are worth stating plainly, because they are what should have caught this before publication:
- The Dirección General de Tributos does not publish numbered "Circulars" that
rewrite a statute. It answers taxpayers through consultas vinculantes, cited in the form V1200-26. Binding tax rules in Spain arrive as a law, a decree, an order or a BOE-published resolution — each traceable to a dated BOE entry. - Administrative guidance cannot add a requirement that the statute does not contain, and cannot apply one retroactively. Any article claiming both at once is describing something that could not have happened.
We have found no BOE entry, no Junta de Andalucía publication and no professional commentary corresponding to the instrument this article described.
What we are doing about it
The pipeline that produced this article has been reviewed. Muse Marbella publishes tax and legal commentary because our clients make eight-figure decisions on it, and that is precisely why an invented circular is not a tolerable error. We would rather carry a visible retraction at this URL than quietly redirect it somewhere flattering.
If you took a decision, restructured a holding, delayed a completion or paid for advice on the strength of the withdrawn article, please contact us and we will put you in front of a qualified Spanish tax adviser at our expense.
For the current position on Spanish property taxation, see our guide to property taxes in Marbella and Spain and our Spanish Golden Visa 2026 update. Nothing on this page should be relied on as tax advice; Spanish tax treatment depends on personal circumstances and should be confirmed with a licensed asesor fiscal.